First Light: An Introduction to Meru Foundation Research

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] sending my apartment Newton Massachusetts in 1968 and I had this very look at the beginning of Genesis in Hebrew which was a strange urge considering the fact that I didn't read Hebrew although I did know the alphabet now I have one talent in this world that is on the visual pattern recognizers maybe has become residents already and my eyes fell on the letters and I could not get it out of my head that there was something cooler about the sequence of letters it just didn't look like language to me since I could read it that was a further reason why it doesn't look like language if it had looked like language if I had been a good student in my earlier days and had learned to read Hebrew I would have just like you pick up a piece of paper in any language you don't start counting letters and look at letter patterns you simply read what said them and I would have Seamus I never learned to read Hebrew but I did learn to read the alphabet and my one talent in life is that I'm a visual pattern recognizer when I see something visual in front of me that makes a pattern I spot it very quickly now if I could have read Hebrew this couldn't have happened but because I couldn't read the Hebrew words my eyes fell on the letters now you know if you hold up a newspaper and you can read the words you never look at the letters it would be very difficult to do but I looked at the letters and all of the bells and whistles in my brain one or all those pattern recognizing alarms when I often said there is something most unusual something peculiar about this sequence of letters so I asked around assuming that Genesis was the most heavily researched document going and people told me they didn't know what I was talking about I asked the rabbi has two priests I went over there my tía went over the Harvard like nothing eventually people told me this must be Kabul on must be Hebrew mister well I've never heard of cibola so I decided I better get educated if I was going to figure out what was going on here and I realized that if no one about this and there really was some kind of coding in the letters of the text of Genesis then this could be very important so I spent from 1968 until 1978 when we moved to San Francisco collecting and reading just about every text in English that I could find that was on mystical traditions I read Kabbalistic material Hebrew tradition I read Christian and Muslim I read Hindu and Buddhist Taoist and ancient civilizations of all kinds I read Greek metaphysics oral translations in English for the very wide gamut I read things that were even written by people who claimed to be up and flying sources I was completely indiscriminate and I started to put together a sense that even though I couldn't figure out what they were talking about it was very nice poetry and yes they might very well be meditations involved um the literary criticism methods that the academic scholars used to make sense of kabbalistic texts didn't do much for me yes I could see compared this sentence that sentence but that didn't tell me anything about what the author was saying it just told me he was saying the same thing here is here and eventually after ten years I started to build up the sense that these kabbalistic texts were talking about something there was just too many details for it to be pulled out of the air there was just too much commonality to be to be the text to be the individual experiences of mystics there was there was something that bound it all together and it didn't matter if I was really Rosicrucian material or reading Sanskrit material in English translation or Hebrew material it all seemed to have the same underpinning and many others have claims as to their there are numerous teachers over the centuries who could claim the same thing but I wasn't satisfied by them simply telling you it was all the same it didn't look the same it just felt the same so the idea is to find out what was going on over those years over the ten years I have realized that if there was a pattern in the text and if I was going to show it to somebody else then I have to follow the scientific method people had claimed for centuries that these text was special this is a sacred text but being able to show that to skeptical technical modern minds like the people I was associating with was very difficult so I had grown drawn up a set of criteria a set of scientific tests of kind of postulates that I expected to be checked off one by one I did not want to do what many people do and go and make guesses and get ahead of myself or go fishing because that would short-circuit the scientific method it was absolutely essential that I make a plan and I stick to it and I unfold it step by step just as good science is done and it finally dawned on me that the first verse of Genesis had a string of 27 letters followed by the 27th letter 28 letters all together 27 letters the 27th letter and a 27 letter alphabet that comes along with it three statements of 27 and 27 is 3 cubed I said to myself gee I wonder what would happen if I counted the letters out in base grade like 3 so I ultimately tried other bases also but when I counted by threes interesting things started to happen you know if you look for 20 years and you're reasonably clever you're going to find patterns there's no big deal to finding patterns the question isn't whether you can find patterns the question is whether they have any meaning if you introduce an idea and it has nothing to do with what you're doing you won't get any new information out by using that idea when I shine the light of base 3 on the text all of a sudden I start to get patterns the only thing you can tell about this pattern is 1 it certainly isn't a coincidence in fact researchers at UCLA and at bar-ilan University in Israel and Technion in Haifa Israel has done statistical tests on the text they haven't done it when I first did this but they have now and there's no question that there's letter level coding throughout five books of Moses when I use base three two count out the letters the whole first verse becomes one unit there aren't any letters left over everything has its place a rabbinic teaching and the teaching is that the Torah is eternal the Torah is unique it's not just a bunch of stories it's not like anything else not even like anything else sacred and Judaism such as the Talmud which is extremely important the basis of Jewish practices in the Talmud but the Torah can't even be compared to the Ptolemaic that would be sacrilege Torah is so unique it can only be compared to itself so in decides compares itself seemed reasonable how do you compare a text to itself well now we back to literary criticism should I look at the first story in genesis of jena of the creation and the second and compare how they differ well that's already been done it wasn't very satisfying and besides it didn't give me anything new to work with i'm looking at the letters so I said what would happen if I compared the letters to themselves and that's what I did you know how you make a paper doll or paper airplane take a piece of paper you stick tab a into slot a me if it's head B into slot B and have seeing the flock see you Auto correlate it you correlate it with themself a day with slot a tab B with philosophy and the piece of paper folds up hopefully into the model it was intended to make and so I decided to fold up this string of letters in such a way that letters that were the same we're going to be next to each other I wrote the letters out one each on a bead on a bead chain in the order that they were written in the text so you could literally hold out the be a chain and read the first verse of Genesis and then I took the bead chain and curled it up on itself so the same letters lined up now hold up the pattern that we got when we associated the letters slide a and tab a have B and slot B etc just like the paper pattern and as you can see all the letters are accounted for they're all paired up and if they're not pad with the same letter like slide a and tab a and fluffy and tad B they have paired with letters that are in symmetrical positions in the alphabet so there's a very basic simple rule that enables all the letters of the first verse to be self connected just like the tabs and slots the reason I started here rather than on the edge someplace is because I realize this is uncertain of a doughnut which one can pull throw and they didn't want these lines across over 20 way so I could be located at so itself but if we're on the surface of a doughnut then that would all work is one one unit and so that's what the first word suggests is draws it draws kind of doughnut called the two tourist two-dimensional surface on a torus so he's now identified the first verse of Genesis it folds itself up into a gun to the bagel theory of reality you just peel the seven card map off of the doughnut and you have a little text this is the default definition of the Bell net you don't need the rest of the gun mathematicians don't need to do they just want to put the services you know how it all fits together they're done and what we found and this is really quite startling is when we simplified it mathematically we ended up producing a form that looked just like this this is before we actually made this is a minimal geometric way to represent the way the first verse of Genesis forms itself when it's letters are paired up just like making a paper model now you probably notice particularly if you know something of Jewish tradition and teaching that this looks a little like a flame and letters are said to come from the flame or from prior they were written in fire on the original tablets given to Moshe if you look at this form from different directions you can see all shadows 2-dimensional outlines of all the Hebrew letters and we pretty sure the same form or some very very closely related form produces the Arabic letters and a related form but not quite the same produces the Greek letters and so we've got the first source of genesis folding itself up into a form that when you look at the form from different directions makes all the letters in which the text is written and so we have our fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself and when we look at it from the appropriate directions for instance that direction and we hold it here make it easier we see the Hebrew letter Beit the English equivalent English equivalent will be the letter B the Greek would be beta this object is entirely a symmetrical object which in the past we've identified it'll flame flame conscious Hebrew letters have said to come from flame Arabic letter said to come from flame shadows of that off of this object are all of these evil letters same one object generates all of these letters of the opposite [Music] here is a text written in an alphabet they curled himself up into a form that can't shadow that of the letters the text is written in fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself that is very self indebted that is very soft where parental that's a very reflexive problem creating its own letters in which it's written again the key idea but don't be overly impressed if I had taken a coat hanger and bent it up with a couple of squiggles and played around with my shadows I'd have found all the letters in just about any alphabet it is not hard to find shadows of a squiggly form that look like letters it's hard to find a explicit meaningful form that does that and so it's the fact that that's a meaningful form that counts not just that you can make shadow grams that make letters we've also discovered even more startlingly that this is not just a flame representing the flame of consciousness but it's also a model hand representing our self-awareness it's our hand that designates us a special in the animal world it's our opposable thumb that is associated with our ability to make and use language and to make and use tools it is from the word for hand in Latin Manas that we are called humans and further it's from the region of our mind that controls our hand that we derive the regions that control our speech and there is another point that needs to be added not only a Hebrew tradition is it taught that the letters are made of fire or flame but they are also said to come from God and that is taken to me the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet the letter yard which is the component that makes up all the letter shapes but yet also means hand this hand and when you look at this form from various different positions you see all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet when you make different gestures with your own hands you see different outlines different shadows of the same model in fact you can see all the Hebrew letters and you know what each Hebrew letter has a name and the name of the letter pay make the letter pay it's name means mouth and you see it when you make this gesture that's the Hebrew letter pay now you'll see it my left hand I'll see it in my right hand so it's a symmetrical set this gesture produces the letter Zion anybody want to guess what Zion means how about project the human hand is the union embodiment of a general principle that projects consciousness into physics and if we look at that general principle of projection from all the possible directions we can look at then we can in theory take any path possible in consciousness or in business so what what we're finding is that there is a general principle that models the way we project our will into the world which is an analogy for the way if I can say this God's will is projected into the world through us that this is a a cascade of creation that we are in the line of this cascade and that this is a model of it so that's what we have here we have a natural universal gesture language turned into a formal system for recording and playing back meditational exercises which can become the true basis for a science of consciousness which in modern terms becomes a religion or several religions actually and that's also what this model talks about this is very controversial material because in the words of a friendly scholar it can't be so and what of course he means is that if it is so then there's a lot of readjustment to make and I try to explain to people that this really doesn't say anything like I'm right you're all wrong it says rather that this is a deeper level that integrates a whole range of material and it demonstrates mostly that what the scholars have been saying and what the religious people have been saying and what the different religious people have been saying they're all been right but in their own context and that if you go deeper then you find something more common let me say it I think that if we get this right if we can figure out what this natural unfoldment is and we keep track of it in a way that was intent which is going to be the most compact and economical way we are going to be able to show the sequence of letters in the Technic Genesis is just as determined as the sequence of digits in the decimal expansion for pot that is a natural artifact of this universe at the level of in fact that quality is very similar to pause after all the text you're not supposed to change a letter B destruction of the universe if you change any digit and try it let me be fine and I think your use of the mathematical metaphor here is not just an accident no not at all because it automatically we understand the idea of truth as modeling something experimental that we find in the real world if someone says they have a truth and they use a spiritual sense we tend to laugh at them well your truth your truth whose truth is truth but if these texts were canonized based on the fact that the sequence of letters was as precise and explicit as the sequence of digits in saying the versal constant like pi they only have a whole different understanding of what what might have been meant by the various ages of these various traditions claiming they had the truth this is the letter bet date it's the first letter of the text to Genesis it's the one translated end it's formal meaning is house but God's not a noun God's verb and Hebrew is a real mode language that means the primary roots are verbs not nouns so it's not a house it's housing it's what a house does a bait represents the distinction between inside and outside and that's going to turn out to be enormous ly important the credo of Judaism what Abraham is credited with discovering is the unity of inside and outside there is a four-letter name a five letter name for God four letter name is the transcendent point within the five letter name is all various apparently the imminence of the universe many people over the centuries have had meditation experiences have come upon that one point of light that meditation with transcendental point within and people for centuries have worship idols and gods of all kinds and everyone knows these most people in this room know if you do your affirmations even if it's to a pagan Golden Calf or country you're going to get what you want because the process of affirmation causes manifestation the key to this teaching on which the Abrahamic faiths are based on which the Brahmas faithful base is that these two manifestations of deity of presenting are identical are unique that's the crucial oh saying to that the God within the point the meditational point and the older is apparently of nature in the physical world of God of eminence our one our unity inside outside and the process of revolving than the goal for unity this is the first word of Genesis let's look at the first word of Genesis it's supposed to contain the whole secret it's supposed to be able to repeat this date this basic idea in more detail so here's debate which means in or in the and then we have this word race which is said to mean at the head of because the word race means head well there's another root in here which is not usually the in that this route Russia Russia is a woven net or network and I'm going to say that the reason the academic statisticians have found letters get patterns in the Hebrew Bible is because it's a woven document like a Navajo rug with stripes and if you unravel it you get skip patterns on the thread because that's what the stripes leave and I'm going to say that that's the kind of clothing that was done in the ancient world and hopefully we'll get to that this is a wonderful model of of everything by definition this isn't a jealous god of a petty people who says my God is bigger and better than your God because it's my god and it's the one God because I say so that's not what we're saying here I'm saying we are starting with the definition of singularity and wholeness definitions are not the basis of prejudice the postulate I'm putting it down to feel good of this does give us anything and if we look for the means of spanning between the one and the many we have a path that includes everything in the universe now modern physics attempts a bottom-up reconstruction take all the diversity we find all the forces in the world and pump the energy up until things merge together and eventually we can extrapolate and find the Big Bang the one from the many and I'm saying we can do this abstractly we can do this pathologically in principle without any electron microscopes and cyclotrons and supercomputers we can start top down by definition start with a singularity break it up by minimal first distinction and end up with all there is and it's my guess and this is still a guess that one way or another in an extraordinarily elegant way perhaps the most elegant possible that's what the sequence of letters in the Hebrew Bible really represents we look at religion if we look at history as static then we've got a fossilized structure that online but if we look at a living tradition it's just like a living thing a tree doesn't look the same during all phases of it life sometimes it looks like an acorn sometimes it looks like a tree sometimes it looks like leaves and branches sometimes it's all desiccated sometimes new fruit has before on the ground of decay the current phase of the Jewish cycle is to be a vessel the rabbi's have created this incredibly coherent vessel that survived thousands of years of persecution and has continued to carry the Torah intact and in principle of light in that Torah the meditation the science of consciousness in that Torah through the centuries now that doesn't one doesn't mistake the vessel for the light inside someone doesn't the mistake a librarian for person who has command of knowledge in the encyclopedia those are two different functions the rabbi's in our modern times have been brilliant and community building that maintaining a a community that can maintain the Torah and maintain its own integrity and keep the Sabbath and in fact that's why I'm honoring that tradition because if it weren't for people doing that hard work this well would have dried up and I am doing research that's benefiting from the sweet water this tradition is preserved so I have to honor that and I think that's that's a really valid way to respond to a traditional teachings we have a vessel in order to get into the vessel you have to respect the vessel you have to be part of it and then it can open and then what's inside is worth even more demonstrating to the scientific community the traditional material handed down over thousands of years is valid today will provide great respect for the traditional material and demonstrating to observant people to religiously intense people that what they've been protecting and carrying all these years is now respected in the world will enable them to open to the world a little more and be somewhat less defensive now I'm generalizing I don't mean this is sort of panacea but this is part of a legitimate bridge between various seemingly opposite elements in our society whether it's between science and religion whether it's between the secular world and the observant world these same models also generate other sacred alphabets that came later the Greek alphabet the Arabic alphabet are also generated by the same form at the beginning of the text of Genesis draws for us so we ought to be able to show that some of these other traditions have a connection at this mathematical level at this consciousness level and that thereby traditions can respect each other this isn't a matter of making everybody's religion the same far from it those are totally different embodiments we approach from different directions but the basis the common element in our consciousness in our hands literally is what we have and it's the alphabet and I think that's very beautiful [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Meru Foundation

Views: 16,391

Keywords: jewish, kabbalah, judaism, interfaith, geometric metaphor, stan tenen, Meru foundation, hand gestures, sacred geometry, bible, genesis, torah, physics, bible coding, pattern recognition, hebrew alphabet, abrahamic, consiousness, cosmology, Old Testament, hebrew letters, Ancient world, Religion, Big Bang, knot theory, biblical, biblical archeology, jewish history, spiritual traditions, hebrew bible, bible history, universal language, ancient texts, spirituality, formal language, Unity

Id: midn6ABiZMA

Length: 30min 53sec (1853 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2017